Seattle Schools Community Forum

Monday, December 9th Curriculum & Instruction Committee meeting from 4-6 p.m.  Agenda.  Update on math adoption scheduled. Wednesday, December 10th Executive Committee Meeting, 8:30 am to 10 am. Agenda .  Mostly review of upcoming Board meetings and legislative matters. Oversight Work Session; Finance . 4-5:30 pm.  Agenda Interesting to see on page 13 that in nearly every division in the Budget department, spending is to go up in 2013-2014.  This after our new CFO (and that's what I'm going to call him because these lengthy titles are a pain), Ken Gotsch, said at the Board retreat that the current shortfall is between $18-19M and they have to look for reductions.  They could try keeping the budgeting for these divisions at their current levels for one.  (In fact, the "assistant superintendent" - I'm not sure who this is -  has a budget that goes from  $301,117 to $484,269.  That's up over 30%.) On page 15, they have a pa...

I am going to create a one-sheet list of my suggestions for easy reading but here it is fleshed out. (I'll have the one-sheeter by the end of the evening.) As a preamble to what I would suggest the district should cut, I make these disclaimers: I have looked through all the documents available for 2011-2012 budgeting. They do not follow in a real and coherent fashion so it is not really possible to discern exactly what staff is saying. There was an initial listing , followed by another presentation and the Strategic Plan Budget Planning Tool followed by the Budget Balancing tool . I can't tell if the planning tools overlap. I know that the Board pushed back on some initial ideas (like selling the radio station at Hale) so naturally it fell to staff to look at other areas. Staff is right about the difficulty of planning when there are unknowns looming. What will the economic update forecast be on March 17th? What will labor partners have to say? I am going wi...